Kinect SDK Out!

Thought I would check in and tell you about my crazy 24 hours coding on the new Kinect API. I flew in a couple of days ago here to lovely Redmond, WA in order to see if we could come up with something super cool. We decided to continue working on improving our gesture recognition:

Here you can see the fabulous skeletal rendering afforded by the Kinect SDK. In addition to the skeleton (of which there are countless joints), the SDK provides depth data to the millimeter.

Installation was truly super easy. I installed the x64 package and was up and running fairly quickly. I ran into issues with the OpenNI drivers necessitating a manual removal of the drivers from the device management.

The only challenge here is that I really got no sleep!

Now the important question: What does this have to do with reporting?

Everything! Here is a device which can literally track the presence of up to 6 people! Imagine the ramifications of such a device! Imagine the data that could be gathered for a particular room in a building. I can almost see the crisp charts, the nice pivot aggregates, and the lovely tables of resource utilization data that this could produce! The main idea behind reporting is allowing your data to tell your story.

What if you were a physical therapist assisting a recovering patient. Imagine the kind of report one could product over a period of time! In essence, reporting exists to discover the hidden meaning of your raw data.

What will you find today?

As always, if there are any comments and/or questions, feel free to get a hold of me!

Now MS need to release a more rugged business oriented version of the Kinect and they'll be laughing.

17 June, 2011

Peter Thorpe

I gave it a go I can see some really cool things coming out for this once developers have had some time with the official SDK. The audio API is quite impressive from the looks of it as well.

What seems to be missing at the moment though is close up face tracking. I thought they would add some features to map peoples facial expressions and perhaps which way they are looking rather than the far away skeleton tracking. Same for close up hand tracking, you currently need the majority of your body in view.